LITTLE BOOK CLIFFS — The stallion broke away from a band of horses and charged past a small knot of visitors at the Little Book Cliffs Wild Horse Range, its coal-black tail streaming like a wind-borne challenge.
The show wasn’t for the two-legged intruders. He was moving on another male, a “bachelor” lurking nearby hoping for a chance to cozy up to a mare in the stallion’s band, said Jim Dollerschell, wild horse range specialist for the Bureau of Land Management.
“The bachelor was making his move to see how far he could get,” Dollerschell said.
The 36,113-acre preserve northeast of Grand Junction is home to 165 mustangs. It’s one of the few areas of federal land where the population of wild horses is generally in sync with the BLM’s mandate to balance the needs of mustangs with other users of the public land.
Rapid population growth of the herds has resulted in ranchers’ complaints that the animals consume forage and water needed for cattle; an exploding numbers of horses and burros that challenge the BLM’s ability to manage them on and off the range; and anxiety among advocates who fear the government will legalize their slaughter.
Advocates say contraceptive drugs can halt galloping herd growth, but the BLM says the drugs are difficult to administer and require frequent reapplication.
The Trump administration has proposed a $10 million reduction to the government’s wild horse management program, a cut that advocates fear will place the horses in jeopardy of wholesale destruction.
The 2018 budget proposal would reduce money for birth control and asks Congress to kill a rule that prevents the BLM from selling horses to slaughter houses where they would be butchered for human consumption. It also would allow the agency to destroy healthy horses.
A House appropriations committee has paved the way for a reset in policy, recently voting to do away with a prohibition against euthanizing healthy wild horses.
“Removing the prohibition against destruction of healthy horses — that would allow them to kill potentially tens of thousands of horses and burros in holding facilities and on the range,” said Susan Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign. “House members are trying to hide the true implications of this vote from the public by calling it ‘euthanasia.’ The mass destruction of federally protected wild horses and burros is not a mercy killing; it’s slaughter.”
How the horses fare ultimately will be determined during negotiations between the House and Senate on a final budget, Roy said.
Wild horse advocates say the animals are an icon of the American West that cattlemen view as competition for cheap, subsidized grazing on public lands.
Horse slaughter ended in the U.S. in 2007 when the last horse slaughterhouses were shuttered.
“Americans don’t eat horses, and the idea of slaughtering them is opposed by 80 percent of the public,” Roy said, citing a 2016 national survey by Public Policy Polling.
However, horse meat is eaten elsewhere in the world, and domestic horses no longer considered useful to their owners are frequently trucked across borders to slaughter facilities in Mexico and Canada.
A 2015 report by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General, found that between 2008 and 2012, La Jara rancher and livestock hauler Tom Davis bought 1,794 horses from the BLM, and many were transported to Mexican slaughterhouses.
In slaughterhouses, horses “are shot in the head with a captive bolt gun in an attempt to stun them before slaughter — an imprecise process that can result in these animals sustaining repeated blows or remaining conscious during dismemberment,” according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
A BLM statement on the budget proposal says that due to extensive overpopulation, wild horses and burros routinely face starvation and death from lack of water.
“(The advocates’) position is ‘Do nothing and the problem will work itself out,'” said Ethan Lane, executive director of the Public Lands Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Federal Lands. “You have this one out-of-control element that is causing tremendous ecological damage to the range and a horrifying emergency for these horses.”
The BLM manages 247 million acres of land in the West, and livestock grazes on 155 million of those. Horses are present on 27 million acres.
A recent Government Accountability Office review found that the wild horse population, both on and off range, last year increased to about 113,000, more than double the 55,000 in 2000. As of March, 73,000 wild horses and burros lived on BLM-managed range land, a number the agency says is unsustainable and wreaks havoc on the land and the animals.
Each year, the agency rounds up large numbers, moving them to holding facilities. The BLM has 46,000 in holding pens and off-range pasture today, and the numbers continue to grow.
The BLM’s wild horse and burro budget has climbed to $80.4 million this year from $20.4 million in 2000.The animals have no natural predators.
“If we left them alone, the populations would double in four years,” said Chris Joyner, Grand Junction BLM office spokesman.
Long-acting contraceptives could solve the problem, without destroying any of the animals, Roy said.
“A humane solution exists in the form of birth control, but the federal government continues to fail to use it,” she said.
At Little Book Cliffs, Dollerschell and others routinely inspect the land, replacing some vegetation with grasses more palatable to the animals. Also, with the help of Friends of the Mustangs, a volunteer group, they handle herd management, gathering, adoptions and application of contraceptive drugs.
Dollerschell, a mustachioed agency veteran who can predict a horse’s behavior with speedy accuracy, offers a noncommittal grunt when asked what effect he thinks the budget reduction will have on the herds.
The BLM has used contraception and adoption to keep the herd close to the 150-horse target set for the rugged juniper and piñon-studded Little Book range.
Walled in by steep cliffs, with fences blocking breaks in the natural barrier, Little Book Cliffs presents ideal conditions for using the contraceptive porcine zona pellucida, or PZP.
Unlike many herd areas, Little Book Cliffs is only eight miles from a population center, Grand Junction, with its 146,000 residents. Tourists and residents visit the range to see the horses, hike or otherwise enjoy the desert. The horses are accustomed to human visitors and aren’t as prone to bolt as those that live on more remote land, Joiner said.
Before PZP was introduced in Little Book Cliffs, the herd produced up to 40 foals each year.
The contraceptive has cut that number in half, reducing the need for “gathers,” the roundups of horses that are put up for adoption or sent to storage.
“The population grows slower, so you don’t have to gather as much,” Dollerschell said.
The BLM uses specially designed CO2 powered air rifles to fire darts containing PZP into hind-quarters of mares. Current vaccines are effective for only a year or two, Dollerschell said. It can take an hour of stalking to get within the 60-yard range needed to dart a wild horse, he added.
Much larger herds roam in more remote areas where the horses are more wary of human interlopers, and it is harder to get close enough to dart them.
The BLM treated only 467 horses with the contraceptive last year, said BLM spokesman Jason Lutterman.
“We would need to gather tens of thousands of animals each year” to ensure that all mares that needed the contraceptive were rounded up, treated and released, he said.
It costs an average of $500 to shoot a dart containing the drug into one horse.
But BLM doesn’t have to stalk the animals to get them into position to dart them, Roy said. They can also be lured into an enclosure with food or water.
Lutterman said the BLM doesn’t track expenses in a way that would show the cost per animal of gathering a group of horses, and then administering the drug.
The number of horses administered PZP on the range shows the agency “is not even trying,” Roy said. “They are spending tens of millions on warehousing. If that was changed to managing on the range, putting resources into that, it could be done.”
“They can also bait or water-trap them, bring them into a corral, dart them and let them go,” she said.
